MeUndies uses data for smarter inventory management

Industry

Fashion, Ecommerce

Location

Los Angeles, CA

Connectors

PostgreSQL, Google Ecommerce

RJMetrics User Since

2014

MeUndies, a fun, quality basics brand, has always prided itself on its startup culture. “We’re very bold around taking calculated risks. It’s a big part of how we operate,” says Terry Lee, COO. And this strategy has paid off: MeUndies reported a 400% growth in revenue last year. The secret to their success? They credit two things: first, a product that customers love and keep coming back for; second, a keen focus on optimizing their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

In the early days, it was tough for the team to know how specific actions were impacting KPIs. CEO Bryan Lalezarian was the only person who knew how to run SQL queries against their database, which made him a huge bottleneck. “People were interested in what the data would show, but they knew they’d have to wait a couple of days for me to run even a simple query. So, we were flying blind a lot of the time,” says Bryan.

Terry Lee, COO

“We believe in transparency—transparency breeds trust. With RJMetrics, every member of our team can view each of our KPIs and watch how their own efforts impact the larger company.”

The tool that fits right in

Today, the entire team shares an automatically-updating KPI dashboard in RJMetrics, and checking the numbers has become a daily habit. “It fits amazingly into our culture,” says Terry. “We believe in transparency -- transparency breeds trust. With RJMetrics, every member of our team can get the data they need into our Amazon Redshift data warehouse, view each of our KPIs, and watch how their own efforts impact the larger company.”

Now that the CEO is no longer a bottleneck, the team is able to drill down further into areas of analysis like customer lifetime value, and most recently, inventory management. “Balancing the fine line of having enough product, but not too much, is a huge challenge for ecommerce startups,” says Bryan. “In our first year, we used to simply buy 100 units of every color in every size, not looking at sell-through rates, on-hand inventory or on-order inventory. Now, spurred by the visibility RJMetrics has given us into our data, particularly on average weekly sell-through by SKU, we’re looking to our historical numbers to more accurately forecast demand.”

RJMetrics makes it easy to explore your data in an intuitive interface backed up by a lightning fast cache.

Data helps prioritize decision-making

“Once the team started tracking inventory in RJMetrics, they quickly realized data-driven decision-making would make a big difference. Below is one of the main charts the MeUndies team relies on. It shows current inventory levels for their top-performing products.

Accurate forecasting takes a lot of data. Buyers need to know sizes, colors, what’s in stock, and what’s being produced but not yet shipped. “Integrating RJMetrics into our suite of forecasting tools gives us the full picture across all of these factors,” Bryan says.

Excited by the impact that better inventory management has had on the bottom line, MeUndies is ramping up their investment on this front. Bryan says that today these types of data-driven decisions are commonplace: “With RJMetrics, every decision we make about how to run our business, from where we spend money to who we need to hire, flows directly from what the data is telling us.”